General notes on the system
The Silent Cubes long-term storage system allows you to archive data via SMB/CIFS and NFS shares to what are known as volumes. The system is true hardware WORM, which, unlike some other industry solutions, makes no compromises in data storage. The following archiving functions make Silent Cubes unique:
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Once data has been stored in the Silent Cubes system, it can subsequently be neither modified nor deleted.
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Even though, when using volumes with a retention period (Compliance Option required), shares, volumes, and files can be removed once the retention period has expired, storage space once occupied on the Silent Cubes is never released again.
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Volumes can only be deleted if they are empty. To achieve this, the retention period of all files stored on them must have expired. Only then can all files, and thus the volume, be deleted.
Data actually occupies storage space on the Silent Cubes. Files therefore can never be deleted. Shares and volumes, on the other hand, are references to this data and can, depending on the volume types used, also be removed from the system again. Due to the special type of storage (content-addressed storage), data cannot be interpreted without corresponding references (i.e. entries for files, shares, and volumes). This "deletion", for example after the retention period has expired, is part of the certification for audit-proof archiving.
Before using the system, think carefully about the purpose for which data is to be archived, whether it should or must no longer be retrievable at a later point in time, and which settings need to be made for this.
This decision-making aid is intended to support you in setting up the Silent Cubes long-term storage system. The following chapters describe the system's core features and answer the most important questions in advance.